Asymmetries In Time - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Asymmetries In Time write by Paul Horwich. This book was released on 1987-04-01. Asymmetries In Time available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Time is generally thought to be one of the more mysterious ingredients of the universe. In this intriguing book, Paul Horwich makes precise and explicit the interrelationships between time and a large number of philosophically important notions. Ideas of temporal order and priority interact in subtle and convoluted ways with the deepest elements in our network of basic concepts. Confronting this conceptual jigsaw puzzle, Horwich notes that there are glaring differences in how we regard the past and future directions of time. For example, we can influence the future but not the past, and can easily gain knowledge of the past but not of the future. Moreover we see a profusion of decay processes but little spontaneous generation of order; time appears to "flow" in one privileged direction, not the other; and we tend to explain phenomena in terms of antecedent circumstances, rather than subsequent ones. Horwich explains such time asymmetries and examines their bearing on the nature of time itself. Asymmetries in Time covers many notoriously difficult problems in the philosophy of science: causation, knowledge, entropy, explanation, time travel, rational choice (including Newcomb's problem), laws of nature, and counterfactual implication—and gives a unified treatment of these matters. The book covers an unusually broad range of topics in a lucid and nontechnical way and includes alternative points of view in the philosophical literature.
Time and Chance
Time and Chance - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Time and Chance write by David Z Albert. This book was released on 2003-02-28. Time and Chance available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students.
The Physics of Time Asymmetry
The Physics of Time Asymmetry - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Physics of Time Asymmetry write by John Turner. This book was released on 1974. The Physics of Time Asymmetry available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Monograph on forecasting techniques and planning methodology in current practice by industrial enterprise management in the UK - includes a description of the research method and analysis of research results. Bibliography pp. 145 to 157, graphs, references and statistical tables.
Chance and Temporal Asymmetry
Chance and Temporal Asymmetry - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Chance and Temporal Asymmetry write by Alastair Wilson. This book was released on 2014. Chance and Temporal Asymmetry available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This volume presents twelve original essays on the metaphysics of science, with particular focus on the physics of chance and time. Experts in the field subject familiar approaches to searching critiques, and make bold new proposals in a number of key areas. Together, they set the agenda for future work on the subject.
What Makes Time Special?
What Makes Time Special? - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook What Makes Time Special? write by Craig Callender. This book was released on 2017-06-30. What Makes Time Special? available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. As we navigate through life we instinctively model time as having a flowing present that divides a fixed past from open future. This model develops in childhood and is deeply saturated within our language, thought and behavior, affecting our conceptions of the universe, freedom and the self. Yet as central as it is to our lives, physics seems to have no room for this flowing present. What Makes Time Special? demonstrates this claim in detail and then turns to two novel positive tasks. First, by looking at the world "sideways" - in the spatial directions -- it shows that physics is not "spatializing time" as is commonly alleged. Even relativity theory makes significant distinctions between the spacelike and timelike directions, often with surprising consequences. Second, if the flowing present is an illusion, it is a deep one worthy of explanation. The author develops a picture whereby the temporal flow arises as an interaction effect between an observer and the physics of the world. Using insights from philosophy, cognitive science, biology, psychology and physics, the theory claims that the flowing present model of time is the natural reaction to the perceptual and evolutionary challenges thrown at us. Modeling time as flowing makes sense even if it misrepresents it.
